Sublime

Accordingly, one can view artificial intelligence as a quest to find shortcuts: ways of tractably approximating the Bayesian ideal by sacrificing some optimality or generality while preserving enough to get high performance in the actual domains of interest.

Martin Bojowald, Once before Time, is one of the most recent proponents of this approach.2

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman summarizes these underlying assumptions about human nature here: “The doctrine that humans are innately selfish has a hallowed tradition in the Western canon. Great thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud, and America’s Founding Fathers each had their

Better still is the next grade, the Popperian creatures, who extract information about the cruel world and keep it handy, so they can use it to pretest hypothetical behaviors offline, letting “their hypotheses die in their stead” as the philosopher of science Karl Popper once put it.